I bit the bullet and purchased a Sapphire pulse model of the 5700 XT a couple of days ago to replace my outdated R9 280x and I'm getting increasingly frustrated with problems. Since installing the card, I experience a brief crackling noise frequently when gaming which is accompanied by a visual stutter. This happens when my sound is coming through my monitor (connected to GPU via HDMI) and still happens when sound is through my headset (connected to motherboard via USB). When this happens while having my headset connected, my microphone will stop picking up sound and will not work until I swap my input device to another and then swap it back. Even when this happens, Windows recognises my headset is still connected and is visible in sound settings, device manager and in realtek software, and still works as headphones. I have noticed it happens more regularly when a game is loading and when in busy areas, but still happens seemingly randomly too. None of this happened with my old GPU.
I've tried troubleshooting using search engines and browsing main tech forums and have tried a few things:
* Changing PCIe in Bios to "Gen 3" setting.
* Inserting the GPU into the other PCIe slot on my motherboard
* Reinstalling drivers. I saw a suggestion that recommended not to install AMD audio drivers, which I tried but did not work.
* Using a different HDMI cable to connect my GPU to my monitor.
* Changing which USB slot my headset is inserted in
* Using a different headset; I tried my partner's headset for about 2 hours which connects via 3.5mm jack and only experienced the audio glitches and visual stutter but no microphone issues. At the same time, she was using my USB headset and had zero problems on her computer, negating the notion of a faulty headset.
To top it all off, my performance on in-game benchmarks runs far worse than what many sources state; for example, running BL3 benchmark at 1080p Ultra settings averages me at 71.4 FPS which is far below what sources indicate should be expected on reference model 5700 XTs (sources:
https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/borderlands-3-performance and
https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/borderlands-3-pc-graphics-performance-benchmark-review,5.html).
I also stutter in busier areas when playing WoW Classic on "Classic" settings (a 14 year old version of the game!) which wasn't a problem on my old 280x, and I hear an odd noise which I think is whine when on the character select screen. I haven't really gotten round to testing anything else because of all the troubleshooting I've done in the past week. EDIT: capping FPS has solved this issue, simple fix I forgot to check. Audio issues still stand.
My specs:
* GPU: Sapphire Pulse RX 5700 XT
* CPU: Intel i5-7600k OCd at 3.8GHz
* Mobo: Asus Prime Z270-K
* PSU: Corsair CX 750M
* RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengeance
* Storage: 256GB Samsung SSD and 1TB Seagate Barracuda
* OS: Windows 10 Pro
Any further advice? I'd rather not send the card back and initially attributed it to AMD drivers (which I've noticed are heavily complained about in relation to this card) but I'm getting the impression my card is DOA because of it's weak performance in comparison to other XTs. EDIT: is it possible the audio issues are caused by magnetic interference?